


Side By Side

by AthenasAspis (agentandromeda)



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: AU where Vaughn goes to Helios, Angst, Angst without a happy ending, Blood and Gore, M/M, Rhys gets absolutely Rekt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-12
Updated: 2018-08-12
Packaged: 2019-06-26 03:10:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15654540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agentandromeda/pseuds/AthenasAspis
Summary: Maybe in some other world, Vaughn stayed safe on Pandora instead of coming with them to Helios. Maybe in some other world, Rhys escaped Handsome Jack without a scratch.This wasn't that world.





	Side By Side

**Author's Note:**

> you can blame @spockykins for this

Rhys had fucked up.

He should never have trusted Jack, never have let him into his subsystems.

And now he was strapped to a chair, various implements of surgery pointed threateningly at him.

All in all, not how he had wanted this heist to go. His mind raced through what would happen if he didn’t get the beacon down to where Fiona, Sasha, and Vaughn were waiting for him. Vallory would order their deaths, no doubt. His friends, lifeless, staring at the ceiling against a backdrop of their own blood.

He couldn’t let that happen.

So he struggled. He took the saw and the laser pointer and cut his arms free, jumping up and grabbing the beacon, preparing to make a run for the trapdoor.

But Handsome Jack wasn’t done.

“You ungrateful bastard!” he roared, and the saw was moving, moving far too fast to track, and it was at Rhys’s chest, and cutting across with deadly precision diagonally down his torso.

Rhys choked on his scream. He couldn’t breathe through the pain. He fell back onto the hardwood floor, his breath coming in irregular gasps as blood pulsed from the wound. Deep, too deep. Error messages flashed across his ECHOEye. Bone exposed. Deep tissue damage. Imminent organ failure.

“And that’s why you don’t stab me in the back, cupcake,” Handsome Jack crowed. 

Rhys tried to sputter out a retort and came up with only blood. The beacon was still clenched firmly in his hand.

Get up, Rhys, he told himself. Save your friends.

So he got up. He clamped his cybernetic arm across the wound, ignoring the blood that spilled past it, ignoring the sickening way his insides sloshed around in ways they shouldn’t. The pain began to dull behind a terrifying numbness as black fog encroached on his vision. 

The ECHOEye notices screamed at him, recommending medical treatment, warning of death if he didn’t lie down immediately. But that wasn’t an option. Rhys was a lost cause. He had been a lost cause the moment he let a megalomaniac control him. His only hope was a legacy made of something more than blood. Saving his friends with the beacon.

The trapdoor. Rhys had tunnel vision. He was shutting down. The trapdoor was all that mattered. Handsome Jack was saying something. It reached him as if through water, as if he was in the bathroom of a house party.

He leaned down to throw open the trapdoor, and blood spurted from his chest. He dimly remembered a required Hyperion first aid course. Spurting blood was not good. Chest spurting blood was even worse. His breath was too shallow, his pain was too deep.

And there he was, collapsed on the edge of the trapdoor, no energy to even claw himself into the hole to freedom.

He dropped the beacon, listening to it clang on the floor. He listened as Fiona grabbed it and ran. An argument from far below. Vaughn wouldn’t leave him behind. Vaughn, always loyal. Vaughn, who deserved better. Vaughn, who Rhys couldn’t leave, not without saying goodbye. 

The ache in his heart—not the physical one, the one that had been there for years, without him realizing it—pulled him over the edge.

“Come back here!” Handsome Jack yelled as Rhys threw himself into the hole, heedless of the bottom far below. The impact wouldn’t be his cause of death. 

Still, it hurt. There was no other way to say it but hurt. Hurt down to his bones, hurt as he hit the ground and more blood came rushing out of him.

He had no words, no breath left. He could only listen.

“Rhys!” 

Vaughn’s face above him.

“Rhys, you’re okay! Fiona took the beacon and left, but I knew you’d come down. I knew you’d be…okay…” he trailed off as his eyes moved down Rhys’s body. Vaughn knelt and cupped his hand behind Rhys’s neck.

“Rhys, oh God.”

“Go,” Rhys managed to choke out. “Just go.”

If Vaughn stayed, something would kill him sooner or later. He had to run to survive. 

“We’re both getting out of here,” Vaughn said decisively. “I’ll carry you out if I have to.” He placed a hand under Rhys’s back and lifted. Vaughn was strong, and could no doubt carry Rhys out of there, but with even that slightest movement lances of agony shot through Rhys’s body, wracking his body like lightning. Something had broken in the fall, and it stabbed at his ribcage. His strangled scream was more torn than uttered from his throat, and Vaughn quickly set him down.

“I won’t make it,” Rhys muttered through clenched teeth. “Please. I don’t want you to die.”

Vaughn grasped his free hand, intertwining their fingers and squeezing.

“I’m not leaving you,” he insisted.

“Jack is loose,” Rhys coughed. “he’ll come for you.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Vaughn repeated. Rhys looked into his steady eyes, not a line of fear in his face. He wasn’t denying his death. He was accepting it.

A tear, then another, ran down Vaughn’s cheeks, and then Rhys was crying too, because this was how he wanted to die: by Vaughn’s side, his slate clean, his choices atoned for in blood.

“You’ve always been there for me,” Vaughn said, more of a murmur than words, or maybe Rhys’s ears were just shutting down. He gave a hiccuping laugh through his tears. “At those parties, and, and that time some jerk tried to beat me up outside the library, and when that professor wouldn’t let me into the honors program,” he wiped away his tears with the back of his hand, “and when Assquez tried to screw me over, and when those assholes from accounting tried to haze me when I didn’t draw my finger guns fast enough,” and then his words were lost in sobs. 

Rhys laughed breathily. 

“I’ll always be there for you, Vaughn,” he murmured, clenching his hand even tighter.

Still grasping his hand, Vaughn curled up beside him, disregarding how Rhys’s blood soaked into his white shirt. He tucked his head into the crook of Rhys’s neck. 

“Vaughn,” Rhys said, and though it came with blood bubbling from his mouth he said it more tenderly than he’d ever said anything before. He let the name hang in the air. Vaughn knew what he was going to say. They had both known for a long time, and it was a cruel injustice that Rhys could only see it as he bled out on the floor.

It wasn’t too late for Vaughn to run. But Rhys would allow him the dignity of his choice. To die by the side of the one he loved.

And it was love, true as day. Love that lurked in Vaughn’s sad glances as Rhys flirted awkwardly with Sasha. Love that flared up fierce in Rhys’s chest when someone decided to pick on Vaughn just because he was short and nerdy. Love that had kept Rhys’s inner compass pointing at the light—Vaughn had always urged them to do what’s right, and not even his idol could sway Rhys next to that.

WARNING: TOTAL ORGAN FAILURE IMMINENT, his ECHOEye told him, and Vaughn must have seen him wince despite himself at this news, because he rested his hand hesitantly on Rhys’s cheek.

“I might not have another change to say this,” Vaughn said urgently. “I love you, Rhys. I have ever since we were in college. And…” and here he broke down into sobs, pressing his face into Rhys’s shoulder, “and it kills me to see you die.”

“I know.” Rhys stroked Vaughn’s hair. “I know. You know I love you, Vaughn.” 

He had never been like this, no Hyperion mask, no ironic quips. It was just him, as if everything false about him was leaching out with the blood. The three hardest words were easy to say, they flowed out of him like water, because once Hyperion was gone the truth was easy.

And then Vaughn kissed him.

It wasn’t like Rhys’s first kisses on flirty dates, chaste and giggling. It was rough, desperate, the first and the last. It was Vaughn’s hands on his hips and in his hair and moving to cup his cheek, Rhys pouring the last of his energy into the last thing he’d do that would matter at all.

It was his heart pounding alive in his chest despite the blood loss, his cybernetics feeling alive somehow, a quiet exhale as Vaughn’s hands brushed his port.

A shudder, deep in Helios. A cracking in the core of the great ship. Rhys knew what was going to happen, and he wrapped his arms around Vaughn, heedless of the blood that poured from his chest like water. 

The walls splintered, and all was cold silence.

**Author's Note:**

> just fyi fiona was the one who destroyed Helios  
> im probs gonna edit this later


End file.
